Twitter Updates
In case your not subscribed to receive Twitter email from us from time to time, here's the text of an email I sent out earlier today.
There have been some updates in the world of Twitter that we wanted to let you know about. Some of them are geeky, some of them are funny, and at least one of them is straight-up useful. If you haven't been around in a while, come visit Twitter and see what your friends are doing.
RSS Feeds for Public Timelines
File this one in the geeky category if you like but now you can follow your favorite public Twitter folks in your favorite RSS reader application. By the way, if you're not sure what that is, give Google Reader a try -- it's free and works great (http://google.com/reader). The Twitter Public Timeline has a feed to but that can get overwhelming. Also, there's Atom feeds too in case you're wondering.
Permalinks or Post Pages
Now every time you make a Twitter update whether it's while you're out and about with your mobile phone or on the web at our site that update gets saved in your timeline and gets to live on it's very own page. To see the page, click on the blue links after your updates that say about when you made the update.
We made these pages so bloggers and link collectors can point to a specific post in time. Sometimes posts are really funny or memorable. There's this one post by courtneyp about a hash brown patty stuck in a bus window that had me cracking up I'm not sure why but it just struck me as oddly funny.
There have also been wedding engagements, car crashes (nobody hurt!), and oddly lots of Twitter users going on parachuting adventures. Sometimes you want to revisit or remember these moments and these pages really do the trick.
The Twitter API
Now for the really geeky update -- we have released an Application Program Interface for developers. This means we've exposed some of the inner workings of Twitter so engineers who want to creatively extend our functionality can do so. We were happilly surprised at how quickly some really neat projects emerged.
There have been some updates in the world of Twitter that we wanted to let you know about. Some of them are geeky, some of them are funny, and at least one of them is straight-up useful. If you haven't been around in a while, come visit Twitter and see what your friends are doing.
RSS Feeds for Public Timelines
File this one in the geeky category if you like but now you can follow your favorite public Twitter folks in your favorite RSS reader application. By the way, if you're not sure what that is, give Google Reader a try -- it's free and works great (http://google.com/reader). The Twitter Public Timeline has a feed to but that can get overwhelming. Also, there's Atom feeds too in case you're wondering.
Permalinks or Post Pages
Now every time you make a Twitter update whether it's while you're out and about with your mobile phone or on the web at our site that update gets saved in your timeline and gets to live on it's very own page. To see the page, click on the blue links after your updates that say about when you made the update.
We made these pages so bloggers and link collectors can point to a specific post in time. Sometimes posts are really funny or memorable. There's this one post by courtneyp about a hash brown patty stuck in a bus window that had me cracking up I'm not sure why but it just struck me as oddly funny.
There have also been wedding engagements, car crashes (nobody hurt!), and oddly lots of Twitter users going on parachuting adventures. Sometimes you want to revisit or remember these moments and these pages really do the trick.
The Twitter API
Now for the really geeky update -- we have released an Application Program Interface for developers. This means we've exposed some of the inner workings of Twitter so engineers who want to creatively extend our functionality can do so. We were happilly surprised at how quickly some really neat projects emerged.
Mo.istThat's about it for now. We're busy on some big improvements and feature updates but those will have to wait until next time.
Celly
Twittermap
iChat
posted by Biz at 5:39 PM
4 Comments:
Thanks for providing this services for us . There are just few things I would love to see at Twitter - a way to delate some of your previous updates from the public time line and a way to schoose who of the friends you have will get the phone update - that will be superb.
I was just visiting the Twitter web site, and I wanted to offer some constructive criticism: After looking at a couple of pages, and especially the home page, I still have no clear idea what Twitter is. You are seriously dropping the ball in doing the basic job of explaining what your product/service (I don't know which it is) actually is. You say what it's for, but that's not good enough for me to actually sign up.
Is it an application?
Is it web based?
Do I have to install anything on my computer or phone?
What kind of people use it?
Does it work with other apps/services?
Does it require any other technologies/platforms?
Some questions are, of course, best left to an FAQ page (which, by the way, is hard to find), but the basic fundamental issues should be stated on the front page, clearly and succintly.
Without it, your only hope for adoption is through friends, word of mouth by people who already understand and enjoy the product, and via the old reliable fact that lots of people will sign up for anything (either because they're curious early adopters or they're just the joining type), learn about it later, and then either keep using it or let it fade from their memory. This last strategy will get you a decent number of new signups, but not lasting members/customers.
Thanks for that great feedback, askrom. We recently did some user testing and discovered much of your comment to be absolutely true. (Too bad we didn't ask you first!) We're working on this now but here's a rough draft:
Twitter is a free, web based application for journaling among friends and family or broadcasting to the general public. There are no downloads or installs required but there is a catch: you've only got 150 characters per update.
The reason for the character limit is that Twitter also works via SMS on texting enabled mobile phones. People usually update their Twitter a few times a day from the phone or the web just to casually mention what they are thinking, hoping, wishing, or doing.
Updates are either published on the web for all to see on a public journal or privately archived on the web and only sent out to a group of friends. Folks can use Twitter all by itself or integrate it using a customizable badge with other services like MySpace, Xanga, or Blogger.
That's probably too long for the front page but hopefully it starts to go in the right direction. You're totally right about the basic need for a clear explanation.
Askrom is right that sometimes it is not that easy to explain to someone what exactly is the service you provide is – and yet I wrote about Twitter:
http://shurl.org/ZHWYI
And noticed that quite a few people do that too – you may even implement some kind of topic discussions in the future – a social network of a new kind – that would be interesting.
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